Civilian Warriors: The Inside Story of Blackwater and the Unsung Heroes of theWar on Terror (13 page)

We stipulated that in the contract because, as always, Blackwater’s executives had been following the news.
Earlier in 2004, nine men had been killed
when a U.S. Black Hawk helicopter was shot down outside Fallujah—even though Iraqi witnesses said the chopper had been clearly marked with a red cross. The next month,
insurgents fired rocket-propelled grenades
(RPGs) at a convoy carrying General John P. Abizaid, who had succeeded Tommy Franks as head of U.S. Central Command. And in the three weeks before we signed on with ESS, more than ten foreign civilian contractors had been killed across Iraq. November 1 hadn’t needed six men—that is, three in each of the SUVs—to simply drive someone from Baghdad up to Camp Taji, but Fallujah, where merely looking American had become a potential death sentence, was something else entirely.

A mission to Camp Ridgeway and back
would mean Batalona and deputy team leader Zovko would have to ride in the lead Pajero, while the other SUV, driven by Helvenston and Teague, book-ended the fleet of ESS trucks, which would be driven by Iraqis. And because it was an urgent request from ESS, Blackwater’s men had to make a go-no-go decision on the spot—unusual, because our security teams normally had twenty-four hours to perform risk assessments before missions.

Batalona determined that even without the fully armored vehicles
and standard manpower the team he had could accomplish the task—but for three of those flatbeds, not sixteen. The men weren’t forced into the mission or somehow ordered to do it—a private company doesn’t have that sort of military authority. Risk assessments
like those were the sorts of judgment calls Blackwater contractors on the ground routinely made to ensure operational safety. No one questioned Batalona’s decision to accept the mission, especially since his insistence on shrinking the convoy showed he was aware of the risks.

At three p.m. on the same afternoon they’d arrived at Camp Taji, Team November 1 and three red ESS flatbeds set off from Taji on their new mission. The caravan made it as far as the Marine base Camp Fallujah, five miles east of the insurgent hotbed, before stopping for the night.

At approximately nine in the morning on March 31, Blackwater’s four men and the three ESS trucks left the base along Highway 10, heading west for Camp Ridgeway. Batalona called back to our operations center in Baghdad to report that November 1’s exact route was still to be determined; a straight run through Fallujah would be far more direct, though far more dangerous. Dozens of minarets stood across the City of Mosques, reaching as high as 150 feet, but otherwise the city’s finished buildings were wedged in next to one another, low and flat, the color of the desert upon which they sat. They offered endless rooftops and alleyways where shooters could hide. Then there were the strings of half-finished homes, with junked automobiles dumped in the streets outside next to piles of loose garbage. One never knew how traffic might flow through Fallujah on a given day—or if some new barricade was part of a plot by insurgents. There was a reason that by the end of its rotation three weeks earlier the Army had rarely entered town with fewer than a caravan of vehicles stacked with troops.

To avoid the city, another route
could take the Blackwater convoy north and then west around Fallujah—a road known to the military as Route Mobile—but that was three hours longer each way. It would not only add time, but also increase the exposure and risk to the convoy. Besides, the Marines in charge now were also regularly blocking roads in the area, and Batalona wouldn’t know for sure which arteries were even open until his team reached an Iraqi Civil Defense
Corps (ICDC) checkpoint fifteen minutes closer to Fallujah. As civilian contractors, Blackwater’s men didn’t have formal access to military intelligence, and the same was true in reverse. The Marines had no idea November 1 was approaching the city that morning.

At that checkpoint, manned by as many as twenty members of the ICDC, the Blackwater team was simply waved through without so much as a word. What happened next remains the subject of intense debate.
U.S. intelligence reports have determined
that Batalona intended to link up with other ICDC personnel on the gritty eastern edge of the city; there, ICDC would lead November 1 on a route through Fallujah that bypassed the morning traffic jams. That plan would have required coordination with ICDC the night before, from Camp Fallujah, and Batalona never told Blackwater’s operations center he’d done so. But there’s no doubt he could have pulled that off. And as the cloverleaf exit for Route Mobile disappeared into their rearview mirrors that morning, the Blackwater team did indeed connect with a pair of run-down pickup trucks full of tan-uniformed ICDC personnel all too eager to guide my men through the city.

Within a mile, November 1’s convoy was led to an intersection with broken traffic lights. An Iraqi policeman standing there directed traffic; Blackwater’s men asked him how to get to Camp Ridgeway—perhaps confirmation that they trusted their ICDC escorts only so far.

We knew corruption was rife within Iraqi police forces; the security environment at Iraq’s Ministry of Interior, which oversees the forces, had become so perilous that Western officials sometimes wore body armor to meetings at the ministry offices. Just weeks prior, General Abizaid had testified before the Senate Armed Services Committee that “
there’s no doubt that terrorists and insurgents
will attempt to infiltrate the security forces. We know it’s happening, and we know it has happened.” The House Armed Services Subcommittee on Oversight and Investigations would later report, “
The Ministry of Interior, concerned about a pattern
of unprofessional and even criminal behavior on the part of many National Police units, started
pulling National Police brigades out of counterinsurgency operations for retraining.” And the officers simply waving Batalona’s convoy through the checkpoint a few minutes earlier wouldn’t have exactly inspired confidence in Blackwater’s men—especially when just through the intersection Fallujah’s morning traffic, penned in by barricades throughout the city, snarled around their convoy. So much for that shortcut.

Crawling west through town, the men of November 1 scanned the sidewalks and kebab shops and storefronts for threats. Zovko, who spoke Arabic, would have demanded the ESS truck drivers behind him stay close, stay in line. Helvenston and Teague surely monitored the convoy from the rear as the ICDC trucks came to a stop up ahead. The caravan was at a standstill.

At about nine thirty a.m., a group of boys approached the vehicles. It’s a familiar scene wherever U.S. military personnel appear around the world, as curious children want to chat, or maybe ask for candy.
One boy put his hands on the passenger-side door
of Batalona’s Pajero. Blackwater’s men rolled down the window and made friendly conversation.

Upon leaving the SUV, two of the boys hurried back to a crowd that was now gathering on the sidewalk.
They spoke to two men in their thirties
, both clad in white dishdashas with matching black-and-white scarves over their shoulders. Yes, the boys said, the men in the first and last vehicles were Americans. They sat down on the ground and faced the lead SUV.

Within moments, at least five gunmen charged from the surrounding shops, their AK-47s erupting with thunder cracks that echoed through the crowded streets. Round after round ripped into the rear SUV; 7.62-mm cartridges tore through the back of the vehicle, then the armor plate, then poured in through the side windows.
Helvenston and Teague never even had a chance
to lift their weapons.

Hearing the assault behind him, Batalona stomped the gas in the lead SUV. Ahead, the road was blocked. Insurgents swept forward
alongside the flatbed trucks. The supposed ICDC escort trucks sped away;
one terrified ESS driver would later report
seeing a heavily armed blue-and-white pickup truck—a police vehicle, he believed—escape the scene down a side street. Batalona wrenched the steering wheel to the left, barreling over the median and destroying one of the Mitsubishi’s rear tires in a desperate U-turn. Now facing eastbound, the two men met a new blockade of stopped cars, and a hail of machine-gun fire from the oncoming attackers. The black Pajero slammed into a stopped car, then came to rest, Batalona’s body slumped over into the passenger seat, Zovko’s head rolled back. As one investigation would later ominously report, “
There was no evidence of return fire
by the Blackwater personnel.”

The entire assault was over in seconds. Four men had been betrayed and ambushed; had there been six in the vehicles that morning, the other two surely would have died as well. Larger guns would have made no difference without time to fire. Facing this sort of calculated, close-quarter execution, even protection kits on the SUVs wouldn’t have saved the men inside. The three ESS truck drivers were allowed to leave—because they, of course, were not Americans.

Only then did the worst part begin. Insurgents burned and mutilated the four bodies, dragged one of them through the streets, then strung up two others from the city’s steel trestle bridge spanning the Euphrates. Crowds of crazed men—and children—beat the bodies and chanted, “
Fallujah is the graveyard of Americans
.” No police officers or firefighters stepped in to halt the brutal desecration, which lasted for hours. Later, nurses from the nearby hospital reportedly tried to remove the bodies from the bridge; gunmen threatened to kill them, too. Marines, who learned of the assault only when footage showed up on Fox News, couldn’t save lives already lost—and they couldn’t quell the riot without more bloodshed. So they did nothing.

Two of the attackers, meanwhile, had carried their AK-47s in one hand and video cameras in the other. They’d recorded the entire
savagery. Soon, just as the insurgents had hoped, TV newscasters were broadcasting it around the world.

•   •   •

M
y phone in Virginia rang around three thirty a.m. By then—eleven thirty a.m. Baghdad time—our operations center there had learned of a brutal attack in Fallujah. Details were sketchy, but they were awful. It sounded like our men. If so, they would mark not only Blackwater’s first casualties, but—in my entire military career—the first for anyone under my responsibility.

Everyone at Blackwater understood that in our line of work losing men was likely inevitable at some point. But that phone call shook me far more than I would have ever expected. I stood there thinking back over my time as a SEAL. I couldn’t help but imagine my family’s grief if they’d been told I wasn’t coming home—and the grief that would soon come to the parents and spouses and siblings of those men who’d been killed. I thought of my children in their bedrooms down the hall, tucked under their covers. I threw on whatever clothes were within arm’s reach; in a haze, I drove through the darkness to my office in McLean.

On the television, Al Jazeera had the footage first—the burning, the cheering, the shattered bodies hanging from that green bridge. Soon it was splashed across American networks, edited somewhat, as if a little pixilation could ease the sight of the dead being torn apart by a mob. It immediately
brought to mind Somalia
and the famous Black Hawk Down mission to Mogadishu in 1993. There, videotaped desecration of Army Rangers so turned public opinion at home, President Clinton ultimately withdrew American forces from the country entirely. We were watching a modern spin on a psychological weapon as old as war itself: The more horrific—and widely seen—the attack, the smaller the actual death toll had to be to generate maximum disgust. The insurgents in Fallujah “knew how to stage that [attack],” John Pike, director of the terrorism research
group GlobalSecurity.org, said at the time. “
They want to frighten us out of Iraq
. It was premeditated, planned, skillfully staged terrorism. They know the degree of dread it will inflict in American family members.”

Whether they were Blackwater’s men on the TV or not, my first thought was to send in a young man with whom I’d spoken outside Fallujah three weeks earlier, during a site visit to our security operations there. I’d been impressed by the former Ranger’s knowledge of the region, its languages, and its people. If anyone could track down the insurgents who’d done this to Americans, I thought, it’d be Jerry Zovko.

By midmorning on the East Coast, however, we got confirmation that the slain men were Blackwater’s, and I learned to my sorrow that Zovko had already gone in. The first thing I wished I could do, more than anything else, was talk to my dad. I’d thought that often as I built a company of my own, but right then, at that moment, my father would have known the right thing to say to the staff, to those families, even to me.

I have always remembered a book he pointed me to when I first joined the Navy:
On War
, a nineteenth-century philosophical exploration of combat by the Prussian general Carl von Clausewitz. “
War is the province of danger
, and therefore courage above all things is the first quality of a warrior,” Clausewitz wrote. “Courage is of two kinds: first, physical courage, or courage in presence of danger to the person; and next, moral courage, or courage before responsibility, whether it be before the judgment-seat of external authority, or of the inner power, the conscience.”

I wished I could talk to my father about that idea of moral courage—about the right way to be a leader, right then. But he was gone. Joan, the only other person whose opinion ever meant as much to me, was gone. As the leader of Blackwater, I needed to swallow my own grief, comfort the bereaved families, and investigate the disaster—all without the support of the two who had been there to help with my
most difficult decisions. I felt deeply alone, but I knew we would get through. We had to.

In Moyock, Gary Jackson took the news with similarly grim acceptance. There, Ana Bundy, who was then in charge of our logistics department, instituted a casualty assistance program she’d mapped out for this eventuality. Jackson, who’d seen Teague at our training center just a few weeks prior, headed to Clarksville, Tennessee, to locate the veteran’s widow. Chris Taylor, another Blackwater VP, left for Oceanside, California, to meet Helvenston’s ex-wife. Mike Rush, our head of security consulting, left for Hawaii to speak with June Batalona. Years later, we would learn that Bundy’s notification protocols were so comprehensive, the State Department would adopt them for all its private security contractors. I didn’t know that at the time, of course. I just knew that I was getting on a plane to Cleveland, to go see Zovko’s mother, Donna. I had no idea what I would say.